Hearing the Words: Supertitles, Translation, and Mahler’s Resurrection

By Milner Fuller
Manager of Classical Programming

For most of his Symphony No. 2, Mahler asks the orchestra to carry the entire expressive burden on its own. Words appear only at the end of the symphony, and when they do, they are used sparingly. Because there is so little text, every word carries unusual weight. How those words are presented—and how they line up with the music—matters.

In an English-speaking concert hall, listeners encounter that text primarily through supertitles. We often think of supertitles as a neutral service: helpful, necessary, and ideally forgettable. In Mahler’s Resurrection, they can never be neutral. The moment text enters the picture, it inevitably shapes how we hear what follows.

I help prepare the supertitles for these performances, and I have spent more time thinking about this project than any previous supertitle work I have done. The challenge here is accuracy: making sure that what we read corresponds as closely as possible to what we are actually hearing in the music at that moment.

Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 is one of the most extreme listening experiences in the orchestral repertoire. It moves from violent upheaval to eerie stillness, from bitter irony to moments of overwhelming affirmation, and it does so on a vast scale. The symphony lasts nearly ninety minutes and calls for massive forces, including an expanded orchestra, offstage instruments, chorus, organ, and soloists. Few works ask so much of their performers, and few demand such sustained attention from the listener. It is also rarely programmed. The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra has not performed Mahler’s Resurrection in fifteen years. When the final movement finally gives voice to what the music has been circling for so long, the effect can feel less like a revelation than a reckoning. This is not a piece you casually attend. It is a piece you experience fully, in the room, from beginning to end.

Reading faster than hearing

One basic problem underlies almost every supertitle decision: we read faster than we hear. Especially at a slow tempo, the eye can absorb meaning before the ear has reached the musical point of arrival. When that happens, a phrase that should feel as though it is arriving instead feels confirmed.

My initial instinct was to display each line as soon as it began being sung. That is how subtitles work in film, and it feels logical. Mahler’s vocal writing quickly exposes why this approach can misfire. Many phrases begin with pickup notes—unaccented upbeats that lead into the real musical stress. Often the first sung word is an article or connective rather than the core idea of the phrase.

In practice, I often let the upbeat pass and place the supertitle on the downbeat, where the phrase actually lands. This is not about delaying meaning. It is about preventing the eye from getting ahead of the ear, and allowing the musical arrival to register before the text settles in.

This way of thinking also affected small technical choices. Compared to past projects, I lengthened slide transitions so that visual movement would not feel rushed against the weight and tempo of the music.

Two lines, one thought

Many of the most important textual moments in Mahler’s Resurrection arrive as couplets. The meaning is incomplete until both lines have been heard. This creates a practical challenge. If both lines appear at once, the second is read before it is sung. If only one appears, the thought can feel fragmentary.

I often handle these passages by letting the text grow with the music. The first line appears on its own. When the second line arrives musically, it is added beneath the first. This allows the listener to experience the first line in real time, then recognize the two lines together as a single completed thought.

Translation as interpretation

Timing is only part of the problem. Translation introduces another layer of interpretation. For this project, I have been synthesizing multiple English translations while drawing on my own limited German. Some translations aim for poetic beauty, while others prioritize literal clarity. Each approach has strengths, but both can create misalignment with the music.

Poetic translations sometimes paraphrase or anticipate meaning, smoothing over the way Mahler parcels it out musically. Literal translations can preserve structure but sound awkward in English. My approach has been pragmatic rather than literary: to line up, as closely as possible, what we hear with what it means at that moment in the score. These choices are not about producing a definitive translation, but about serving the listening experience in real time.

Lessons from comic opera

I first became acutely aware of how much supertitle timing matters while attending comic operas. I have seen audiences laugh before a punchline is sung, not because the joke failed, but because the supertitle arrived too soon. Foreknowledge undid the timing.

The principle carries across genres. In comedy, bad timing ruins the joke. In Mahler, it can dull the sense of arrival the music has worked so hard to create.

An invitation

All of this ultimately serves the live experience. Mahler’s Resurrection is a monumental work—rarely programmed, physically and emotionally demanding, and overwhelming in its cumulative force. Hearing it performed live on February 13 and 14 with Jun Märkl, soprano Lauren Snouffer, and mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor offers the chance to experience one of the great symphonic statements of the repertoire at full scale, as it was meant to be heard.